HTML imaging idea

[golf_cart_john]

A bit ago, I came up with an interesting idea for representing images using HTML. I can see very little practical purpose for this concept, but some of you might find it useful. I've written a small C++ routine that converts a bitmap image into HTML code, and displays the image correctly. To see what this looks like, go to http://www.geocities.com/htmlgames/html_imaging_demo.html . Look at its source to see something very interesting. Right now, the translation results in very inefficient image encoding, about 25 bytes of html for 3 bytes of BMP format image. If you want to see the code, send me a private message & I'll send you the code. I would love it if someone wants to make it more efficient (maybe with JPEG-style compression) and actually use it for something.

[Brandon Martus]

maybe its me, but I don't see anything.

Using Mozilla Firebird. Tried in IE6, and it crashed.

[Noah]

maybe its me, but I don't see anything.

Using Mozilla Firebird.

Confirmation: Firebird doesn't like this.
Mozilla 1.5 doesn't either.

[golf_cart_john]

Try http://www.geocities.com/htmlgames/small_demo.html . It's a smaller version of the same stuff. The other image is a massive amount of HTML (because of my program's inefficiency), and it may have taken up enough memory to make the browser crash. Thanks for letting me know.

[Brandon Martus]

still not seeing anything (in IE6)

[golf_cart_john]

still not seeing anything (in IE6)
That's really weird. You're not seeing a little GIF-like graphic of the number 95? or a similar graphic about Flower Power? It works in IE 5.5. Does IE 6 crash?

[Brandon Martus]

oh. i have been seeing it then. thought those were part of the Geocities ads or something.

[leo_singer]

The reason it doesn't show up in some browsers is that some browsers skip over rendering table datum (<td>...</td>) elements if they are empty. One common solution if you need an empty table cell that just takes up space and contains a colored background is to put a nonbraking space inside, like this:

<td>&nbsp;</td>

By the way, with a program like this you might try implementing a GIF-style lossless compression scheme, whereby if you have several identical adjacent pixels you represent it as a single <td>...</td> with the width attribute greater than 1.

[djcapelis]

GIMP has been able to output to standards compliant all-browser compatable HTML with images for a long time now. What's different about this?

Or perhaps you just didn't know about it... you coulda just used their code (under appropriate license)... it's an open-source project after all.

I would encourage anyone who feels the need to convert a format to HTML use GIMP. It's not limited with the bmp->html either as anything it can open can be saved as HTML.

www.gimp.org